


Come and Be Discovered

by scioscribe



Category: Mulholland Drive (2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dream World, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2018-12-21 02:51:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11934789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Rita chooses her new leaf.





	Come and Be Discovered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laughingpineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/gifts).



They were repainting the bedroom. Coco had said they could—“Of course your aunt won’t mind, I’ve never known anyone so happy to change every little thing if it suited her!”—and Betty felt strongly that it would do them both good to have a change. The paint Betty had chosen was a light green, the color of a new leaf turned over.

“I like it,” Rita said, standing back to see the patch her efforts had made. She wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, clean of any paint: the cut right up by her hairline, Betty noticed, had left a little scar, a thin pink scratch in her pale skin. “It reminds me of a garden.”

“Maybe you had a garden, before.” No, she had meant to stop bringing that up. But it was like a song that was stuck in her head. ( _Llorando. Silencio_.) “Maybe—”

“Shh,” Rita said. She picked up her paintbrush again and dripped green onto the plastic tarp underneath their bare feet; a drop fell on Betty’s bare ankle. Rita knelt down and swiped her thumb across it, smearing it until it wasn’t gone but until the top of Betty’s foot, with its tracery of fragile bones, like the veins in that new leaf, had a soft effervescent green to it. Without looking up, she said, “I don’t care about that anymore. Where I came from, how I got here. Who I was before. I want all that boxed up with Diane Selwyn, like it’s somebody else’s apartment. I’ve switched.”

“All right. That’s fine.”

Betty helped her up and they stood there facing each other, Rita shivering like she had just come in from some freezing rain. Betty, not knowing what else to do, untied the soft woven belt of her sweater, shrugged it off, and wrapped it around Rita’s shoulders. She wasn’t wearing the platinum bob, so her hair was long enough to brush against Betty’s fingers as she held Rita by the shoulders to calm her.

“Back home,” Betty said, “I used to sneak out at night and lie on the roof—you could get to it from my window if you trusted the drainpipe to hold your weight, and it never let me down—and look at the stars. I’d pretend I could see Hollywood, but I didn’t even know which way to look. But it was like my aunt was there, shining, wanting me to come to her. Out there in all that darkness, there was somebody waiting for me, and I was right. But it wasn’t my aunt, Rita. It was you.”

“Come to Hollywood and be discovered,” Rita said. Her voice was pitched lower than usual, huskier. She laughed. “You found me.”

“ _You_ found me. You walked here, with all the other places in the world to go.”

Rita steadied herself. “I didn’t, didn’t I?”

“So that’s what there is to remember,” Betty said decisively. “I’m in love with you, and you’re in love with me. That’s the only place we’re from that matters.”

She worried that she shouldn’t have said Rita loved her before Rita had said it herself, but then Rita let the paintbrush fall and said, “I want to take you to bed, I want to fuck you,” with an edge of hunger in her voice that Betty felt like teeth against her own belly, like the prospect of being devoured only increased her appetite.

They had opened the courtyard-facing window, so it wasn’t paint fumes making her dizzy. The gauze curtain blowing in and out. When she had first moved to LA, the Santa Ana winds with their howls and whines and dry licks of up-thrown dust had driven her crazy; when she had first moved to LA, even with no A/C and nothing but a ceiling fan with a broken paddle, she had kept her windows closed to shut out the noise. But now, with Rita, nothing bothered her. And what was she doing, thinking about when she had first come to LA? She barely knew the city yet, had never stepped into an apartment without Rita, or one so rundown there was no air. And the courtyard was quiet. No wind through the canyon. She was thinking of someone else. She let Rita lay her back against the unmade bed: roll her jeans down over her hipbones and then spread her legs.

Betty, already feeling heat settle down low in her, cupping her like a hand, closed her eyes and murmured, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“Sure, Sleeping Beauty,” Rita said, her smile turned playful, and she did. She tasted—she tasted not like she should have, not like the only toothpaste by the sink, but like chamomile tea, chamomile tea and—no, there she was, she was familiar, everything was fine.

Rita kissed her through her underwear, sucked on her like she was a ripe peach, until the fabric grew damp, damp and almost, from what Betty could see, translucent, the faint shadow of her skin visible through it. Then Rita curved her fingers and pulled the underwear aside, just held the elastic to one side of her mouth, her thumb growing red where the pressure cut into it, Betty’s leg getting red too, not that she cared: she grabbed Rita’s head and lifted her hips, thrusting up against Rita’s lips and nose, her chin, not all of it compatible at all with what she wanted. Hard bone, ill-fitted to the angles she wanted, nothing slotting in exactly right, so she whimpered needily. Rita laughed again, like Betty was all she needed to be happy, was every amusement.

“You drive me wild,” Rita was saying. “You drive me wild, you drive me wild.”

“I love you,” Betty said as Rita licked against her, her tongue unbearably hot, almost too much. “I love you.”

“Yes, I love you,” Rita said, and relief relaxed the muscles in Betty’s legs, let Rita open her even further. “I love you. My Betty.”

Eventually, they did manage to repaint the whole bedroom, and when it was done, they washed Betty’s foot in the bathtub, Rita saying that she had read olive oil would work best, no, rubbing alcohol, or maybe just soap and water; Betty protesting at being tickled. Even afterwards, there seemed to be a little left, no wider than a thread, wrapped around her like an anklet. She liked it. That they should have a ring.

Rita seemed to be marked as hers even though she’d escaped the paint, though. She was let in to all of Betty’s auditions, her face shining from some back seat.

“I know the folding chairs are never comfortable,” Betty said.

“I’d sit anywhere to watch you,” Rita said. “It’s incredible, the way you disappear. It’s so easy for you.”

“I like becoming other people.” It was one of those days when the moon was visible even through the clear blue sky, and Betty kept looking at it as they walked, until she was afraid she would trip. She said, recklessly, “You would be so good, too. I’d love to watch you. Rita, won’t you?”

“I have enough practice being someone else for one lifetime,” Rita said. She took Betty’s hand. “And I did name myself after Rita Hayworth. I’m already a movie star.”

“I wish you’d take off the wig. You don’t have to hide from anyone.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I know,” Betty said. She’d felt the danger like it was a gun pointed at her head, and now it was gone. She added, apropos of nothing, “Diane Selwyn’s dead, and he cast Camilla Rhodes. It’s all happening somewhere else.”

“What is?” Rita said, sounding as if she needed Betty not to have an answer. She turned to look at a black car passing them, a car with tinted windows, and her grip tightened around Betty’s hand. “Keep walking, let’s just keep walking.” The heat of the day had made the wig seem to go with her face less and less, somehow—something about the sweat or its limpness or stiffness, which, Betty couldn’t decide, but it didn’t look real. And she wanted things to be real.

She lengthened her stride to keep pace with Rita and then they turned around a corner, through a pink stucco arch and into an alley made dark by the shadows of the studio buildings around it. Betty leaned back against the wall of the one she had been in and then, thinking better of it, leaned forward, pressed Rita against the wall of the one she didn’t know. Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds and stayed in Hades. In Hollywood, they bought pomegranate juice in brightly-lit little stores, poured it out and told you about antioxidants. Movie magic, taking something mythic and turning it into something you could buy, so long as you could afford the overpriced.

No, she wasn’t cynical. She was fresh. She tasted no chamomile on Rita’s lips. What did she taste?

Margaritas, she decided. Rita, margarita. Lime and salt. Nothing else.

She pulled back and saw that she had bitten Rita’s lip—that was the salt she’d tasted.

But Rita didn’t draw away from her. She was looking at Betty like Betty was some girl made out of gold.

“Listen to me,” she said.

 _Silencio_. It made Betty want to scream. _No, no silence, you were right, don’t risk it._ But for Rita, she did. She had to.

Rita was crying, but she was smiling, too. _The devil is beating his wife_ , wasn’t that what people said when it rained while the sun was shining? If she was keeping Rita here, was she the devil?

_Don’t be so silly, how could you keep her anywhere?_

She listened.

Rita said, “I want you. I love you. You never listen to me, you didn’t listen when I said we didn’t matter and now you don’t listen when I say we do. Goddammit, I need you to hear me. I don’t care about the key, I don’t care where you found it. I don’t want anything unlocked.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Betty said. She felt like she must have fallen; her head ached, especially on one side, and she was woozy. She wanted to close her eyes and wake up somewhere else, but this was her life, and it was such a good one, if only she weren’t so afraid. She said again, more loudly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do. I know you do.” She put her hands to either side of Betty’s face and held her still, made her look. She had the eyes of a movie star—she was right to have ripped off Rita Hayworth’s name and used it as her own. No matter how scared she’d been, Rita had known what she was. “I don’t want everything anymore. I just want you.”

“I’m sorry. I should have—I should never have—” But she couldn’t find what it was she was reaching for. The closest she could come was, “I should have killed Diane myself, if she hurt you.” But that wasn’t right. “Adam—” No.

Rita said, steadily, “I’m in love with you. You, Betty. I’m not afraid of you, I’m afraid of losing you, afraid of all this going away.”

Betty struggled and finally swallowed. She ran her fingers through the stiff strands of hair on Rita’s wig. She said, “You look so pretty, then, I think you look so pretty,” the words so ordinary they would never even have been printed on a candy heart, but Rita smiled at her until her mouth became wide and imperfect and gorgeous.

Out past their alley, the car with the dark windows slunk away, attention diverted.

There was only one thing she needed to do, then, and she felt like she knew it the way someone had once known to build Stonehenge. She reached into her purse and, under the shifting morass of loose change and takeout straw wrappers, came up with a key so blue it felt like she could drown in it. She had bought it, but it wasn’t hers. She had lost possession of it. In the end, the right to use it belonged only to Rita, so Betty handed it over. The jagged teeth of it fit against the lifeline on Rita’s palm like they were made for each other.

“I don’t want it,” Rita said, but she closed her fist around it nonetheless. She exhaled. “It’s like when you stand on the edge of a building and you want to step off.”

“Yes.”

Rita looked at her fist for a long moment—Betty listened for the sound of the car circling back around—and then she said, “Here,” and she brought the key up to Betty’s lips. It was warm from Rita holding it so tightly. “It might hurt, but then it will be done, right?”

Betty nodded. Before she could think better of it, she took the key back and put it in her mouth. She thought she would have to swallow it, like medicine—kill or cure—but it broke apart into dust under her teeth with sugar-like fragility. She coughed.

“It’s bitter,” she said, and it was—God, it was—but the moon was gone from the sky, and all there was was sun. Rita’s lip had stopped bleeding. Betty noticed a flyer on the wall on Rita’s side of the alley, something styled as though it were from the fifties, with a happy woman in a convertible, her scarf flying off her hair and only just barely caught in one hand, waving behind her like a flag as she drove into the hills.

COME TO HOLLYWOOD AND BE DISCOVERED.

“I think this is the part for you,” Rita said, like Betty’s audition was what they had been discussing all along. “And I was asking people about the director before you went in, and they all said he’s good to work with, gives you just a little bit of a push but not anything more than that, not too rough, just to get you to do your best work.”

“Well, I do want to do my best work, you know, something I can really be proud of.”

“And this will be a much better picture than that first movie you looked at.”

“That _script_ , do you remember it?”

They passed out of the studio gates together, laughing, trying to remember particular lines—“I hate you, I hate us both,” Rita said, clasping one hand to her chest and then giggling—that seemed, in the sunshine, even more flawed than the others. Betty could hear the Santa Ana winds again, but only distantly, and she thought they sounded a little like music. Even when people weren’t coming to Los Angeles to be discovered, she bet they would come to listen to the wind. To the way it sounded like someone you loved calling you home.

She was being silly, maybe, but she liked that.


End file.
